


if you lead I will follow (a thousand miles away)

by passeridae



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: BDSM, Body Horror, Bottom Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison, Caning, M/M, Power Exchange, Top Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Whipping, unsafe medical practices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-30 19:09:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18321452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: From his ribs, Gabriel works his way down Jack’s torso, tracing along old scars with his fingers and lips. Some known, some new, the older ones cleaner, occasionally even small enough to be nothing but thin lines hidden under newer scars, these ones are messy and raised, hypervascular red standing out against the pallor of Jack’s skin. When Gabriel reaches Jack’s hip, he stops. His fingers curling over an entry wound. A perfect circle pressed just above the iliac crest, with no exit wound to match. Gabriel looks up, eyebrows furrowed, “Did you dig this out?” he asks, thumb brushing over the indented surface absently, “You of all people should know how bullets can travel.”Jack hums, head tilted to the side, already half lost in his head, “Didn’t have time to,” he tells Gabriel airily, casually,  “you could pull it out for me if you want.”





	if you lead I will follow (a thousand miles away)

**Author's Note:**

> based on the prompt "Distracted With Pain // RECALL" from R76 week 2019
> 
> only about a month late

“Is that too tight?”

“They’re fine, Gabe, good even. If anything doesn’t feel right, I’ll tell you.”

The ropes wrap snug around Jack’s forearms, stabilising him in their hold. Not quite holding him off the floor, but instead making him work to stay upright on the balls of his feet, making him concentrate on the taut line of his form in the still air. Keeping him present in the here and now. Here, in an old Blackwatch interrogation room, one that he and Gabriel have used before, in another life. Before Zurich, before they became whoever they are now. All of this feels fragile and new, even as they settle into it like breathing. He shivers. The concrete under his bare feet is cold, the circulated air chilled. Goosebumps ripple over his skin. As he balances, he starts to slip into a hazy headspace — letting his muscles loosen and his mind float until his world has narrowed down to just his body, this room, and Gabriel. He’s missed this. He’s missed everything about this.

It seems that Gabriel has too. He looks awed, his touch reverent, eyes bright, stepping back from Jack to take in the image of him hanging from the ceiling. Standing just far away enough to see rope, hands clenching and unclenching as he resists the urge to touch, just for a moment longer. Wanting to savour this moment. Of Jack, spread out before him, handing over this power so willingly, after all this time, trusting him in a way he never thought he’d be trusted again. It’s heady, and awe inspiring, and terrifying.

“God, Jack, even having you like this…” He swallows heavily.

“It feels good, doesn't it.”

Jack is staring at him, eyes soft, even as he sinks, as his breath starts to hitch on every inhale. His muscles are loose, letting most of his body weight hang on the ropes, tightening his lungs. Trust is written into every line of his posture and it is staggering. Gabriel swallows again, heavy and overloud in the quiet room, “Yeah, yeah it does.”

A silent moment, a quirked smile on Jack’s scarred lips. Soft eyes, still so blue after all this time. “Then trust me when I tell you that it feels good for me too.”

A further pause, gravid in its silence, then Gabriel snorts inelegantly, raises a hand to rub at his beard, “This is so much more effective than any of those stupid trust exercises the monkey gets us to do in team training.” He steps closer, warmth from his skin chasing some of the room’s cold away.

Jack coughs out a laugh, shoulders hitching as he tries to contain himself, prevent pulling too much at the rope too soon, “I don’t think we could swing this past Winston as an alternative, somehow.”

Gabe grins, dropping his gaze from Jack’s face to his chest. Slowly he reaches out, giving Jack plenty of time to see his movement, and starts tracing his fingers over the scars that mottle his skin. Old and new, a patchwork of red, pink, and silver over top of pale skin. SEP let them heal from what would normally be fatal wounds, but it did so in the same manner as anyone else, anyone unenhanced. Collagen matrices tying the body together, pulling taut to keep things in place as other cells filled the gaps. He traces over a silvery divot running around Jack’s ribs, a slash from an omnic’s bullet which had sheared bone along with the muscles and fat. By the time they’d finished putting it down, the wound had already healed enough that they weren’t able to stitch the skin closed, leaving a two inch band of concave silver that rested where that bone used to be. Jack flinches away at the touch, reflexive, the repaired skin still so sensitive after all this time. 

From his ribs, Gabriel works his way down Jack’s torso, tracing along old scars with his fingers and lips. Some known, some new, the older ones cleaner, occasionally even small enough to be nothing but thin lines hidden under newer scars, these ones are messy and raised, hypervascular red standing out against the pallor of Jack’s skin. When Gabriel reaches Jack’s hip, he stops. His fingers curling over an entry wound. A perfect circle pressed just above the iliac crest, with no exit wound to match. Gabriel looks up, eyebrows furrowed, “Did you dig this out?” he asks, thumb brushing over the indented surface absently, “You of all people should know how bullets can travel.”

Jack hums, head tilted to the side, already half lost in his head, “Didn’t have time to,” he tells Gabriel airily, casually, “you could pull it out for me if you want.”

Gabriel’s breath catches in his throat, the room suddenly becoming far too bright as his pupils dilate. It wouldn’t be the first bullet he’d had to pry from Jack’s overeager body, nor probably the last, but the intimacy of reaching into Jack’s body, removing something foreign and wrong, is one he’d never really got over, no matter how long they were together or how many times he did it. And they’re not in the middle of a battle, not having to worry about being deployed within hours. Here he could take his time, press through the muscle and fat oh so slowly as Jack whined above him. A shudder passes through him, wisping black curls from his bare skin. He wets his lips, swallows. 

“I’ll take that under consideration.”

* * *

They start slow, for them. Gabriel’s belt, the buckle pressed to his palm, laying red stripes across Jack’s back and thighs. Jack is quiet, a few sharp inhales and breathy gasps the only indication that he even feels the strikes, even as Gabriel heats up with the exertion. Up, then down over the entire plane of Jack’s back, welts crossing over welts to form a perfect lattice of reddened skin. Jack shivers with the final hits, bites his lip, remains stubbornly quiet even as Gabriel stops, panting, dropping the belt and stepping forwards to run a nail along a particularly vicious welt. He does it again, the nail becoming a black claw with a thought. The welts are already bruising a deep purple around the edges, fever-warm to the touch. Jack almost, almost whines at the sharp press of nails in the bruise, but manages to catch the sound in his throat. A half-breath of air punched out of him as he sinks further into the sheer physicality of what they’re doing. An escape from his head, giving the power of decision over to somebody else. Gabriel takes his hands off Jack’s back, runs one through Jack’s damp hair. 

“I think you’re ready for the cane, aren’t you.”

Jack hums softly in reply, flexing his muscles just to feel the heat of the welts dig its claws into his back. It’s nice, a good start, but nowhere near enough to satisfy. A prelude to the main event. As Gabriel moves around behind him, there’s a slight moment of pressure against his side. Jack twitches a little at the sensation, still caught off guard by how strange that patch of skin feels. If only he’d seen the bullet coming in time to dodge and it’d missed the nerve, if only. At least sensation will return over the next few months. Unenhanced humans had to wait years, if they got it back at all. After a long silence with barely a breath exhaled behind him he asks tentatively, “Gabe?” He doesn’t think that there’s anything particularly deformed about his back, nothing much different from before other than a few new scars, but perhaps Gabriel had seen something that Jack hadn’t noticed last he checked.

“It doesn’t do anything anymore,” Gabriel’s breath brushes over his neck, “That spot used to make you writhe so beautifully and now…” Gabriel’s forehead presses between Jack’s shoulders and he lets out a shuddering breath, “We’re different people now, I suppose.” Jack opens and closes his mouth, at a loss as to what to say. It was true, they were both so different and it had been so long, there’s no way they could bridge that all at once. They knew this. But it still hurt, like probing at an open wound, to realise all those small ways in which they’d changed. In the end he settles with, “Not so different. I’ll still make those noises you like so much if you bite my thighs. The ones you called undignified and loved to get me to make at formal events, remember?”

The chuckle across his neck is fond, almost tender, the kiss Gabriel places on his skin even more so. “Would you still like the cane?” he asks, voice soft.

“Please, Gabriel,” Jack responds, wriggling just a little to encourage Gabriel to start. Gabriel presses one final kiss to his skin before pulling away and stepping back. Jack can hear him taking a deep breath before the sound of the cane hisses sharply in the still air. It lands across Jack’s back with a crack, a sharp line of fire flaring out from the impact site. He tenses, automatic, unintentional, and pain sparks up his spine like electricity. It’s perfect. He only needs a moment to fall back into a hazy headspace. A second strike, lower, another twist of heat settling into his skin. Jack gasps properly this time and breathes in on a whine. Gabriel makes a low chuckle behind him, and oh that makes something warm twist in his gut even as he trembles through a third and a fourth lash. 

The next is angled, sharply, catching around the swell of his hip, and he chokes out a plea as the resulting welt immediately blooms into a violently purple bruise that spreads and spreads. He trembles, losing himself in the sensation. Sharp and crisp and so tremendously bright. A fifth hit, sixth, he loses count. Ropes bite into his wrists and forearms, tearing at the skin as he writhes in their grasp, briefly losing his balance on the floor and gasping as his shoulder joints strain against the weight. The room around them is cold, chilled, but he’s so warm he half thinks he may burn up. 

“Gabe,” he chokes out, breath tight, dizzy and lightheaded. It feels so good, he’s missed this so much. Gabriel is immediately at his side, gently touching his chin, turning his head so they can see each other. His eyes are concerned, always so concerned now, Jack would reach out and touch his cheek if he wasn’t bound, reassure him. “I’m good,” he informs Gabriel, gravely, “so good, want more.” It’s so bright in the cell, sharp lights setting them in their own little world, and he’s so very, very warm already but he wants to burn, to fly up as an ember and spark into nothingness. Wants Gabriel to wreck him, like he used to, like they used to do together. “Please,” he adds, leaning in to Gabriel’s touch.

Gabriel’s worry smooths into a faint smile, matching the dopey one that is no doubt on Jack’s face. He runs his hand from Jack’s chin, down his front, calluses catching and pulling on scar after scar, pressing his fingertips sharply into the swelling bruise that encircles his hip. Jack chokes, grabs at the ropes holding him up for something to ground him, pants short and sharp as Gabriel keeps pressing harder, harder, before dragging his nails across the hypersensitive skin. 

A shudder wracks his frame, a yelp torn from his chest. His skin glimmers with sweat, muscles tremble, half out of his control, eyes refusing to focus. He loses track of time, of his surroundings, somewhere between the bright-hot, bone deep ache and the waves of sparkling heat that roll out from the wound as the pressure fades. His head lolls to the side, too drunk on sensation to keep it upright any longer. Gabriel’s form is in his peripheral, smoking in lieu of sweating, his hair starting to fade into fractal blackness which dissipates as he stands, holding their next implement in his hands.

Black leather, threaded with thick stainless steel wire. A single tailed whip, an old favourite that Jack knew burned in the wreck of Zurich. Made anew, glimmering in the dull light, constructed specifically to make Jack bleed with its weight and its length. Jack doesn’t realise he’s keening low in his throat until Gabriel chuckles at the sound and walks back towards Jack’s bound form. Jack’s vision fixes on the sight of the whip’s tail brushing the floor, the soft sound of leather on concrete. Gabriel forces his gaze away with a hand on his chin again, “A little surprise for you, thought you’d like it.”

Jack more than likes it, his response is almost a visceral need. “Please,” he chokes out through the heaviness of his tongue, “Please, Gabi, please.” But, then, need and want aren’t all that he feels, are they. There are other emotions, lurking deep under all that desire. Gabriel is holding a symbol of their past in his hands, shiny where it should be matte, gleaming where there should be a patina. Subtly wrong, like so many things are for them now, and seeing it hurts him somewhere deep even as he pants and pleads for Gabriel to do something with the whip, to hit him please, please. God, they’ve hurt each other so much already, consensually and otherwise, and those memories sting like thorns around his throat, ripping and tearing and curling around a kernel of fear — what if, after all this time, it’s not the same. They’re not the same. What if he’s too different now for this to work? How will they even be able to come back from that sort of blow? Jack’s breath hitches, torn between molten desire and icy fear and a desperate need for Gabriel to touch him again. He leans forwards, towards Gabriel, and tilts his head invitingly. Pleading.

Gabriel’s lips quirk, and he leans forward to kiss Jack gently on the lips, breathing a soft cloud of smoke into Jack’s mouth. Jack’s lungs seize, breathless, and he gasps for more even as Gabriel pulls away. Not tonight, taking Jack’s breath away is for another time. Jack puffs out little clouds of dark smog, mouth open and damp, eyes bright and pupils blown. “Please, please,” he mouths, no air to give his words voice but he can’t stop asking.

”Of course, Jackie, don’t worry. It would be cruel of me to tease.” 

The welts from the belting have already healed, the remaining bruising faint and looking weeks old. The cane marks are fading, too, past the apex of their swelling, raised lines retreating into Jack’s scars and skin. Gabriel runs the cool leather of the whip over Jack’s back, lets him shiver at the promise it brings. Jack feels pain so much more acutely than Gabriel, than anyone really, healing as fast as he does. All the heat and hurt crammed into such a short space of time, weeks of painful healing in minutes. Burning from the inside out until everything is back to its baseline state. It’s agony, even as he begs for more. There’s nobody he’d trust other than Gabriel to take him through it again and again, nobody else he’d trust to even know about it. Even Angela doesn’t know, he keeps this secret so close to his chest. It’s only ever been Gabriel.

“Please, Gabi,” Jack whispers, entreating, and that’s all it takes to jolt Gabriel back into motion. “Of course.” He pulls back and brings the whip down across the fading stripes, striking across the meat of Jack’s back. It’s not hard enough to split the skin, not yet, but Jack rocks forward on his toes at the force behind it, lets out the smallest of whimpers. The next one draws blood.

Jack quickly loses himself. White hot lines stripe across his back, radiating heat through his muscles and into his bones, causing him to shiver with the sheer volume of sensation. The warmth of blood trickling down his back, along his legs, to drip to the floor. The smell of copper in his nose. His legs trembling from the strain of holding him up. Hair sticking to the nape of his neck, his teeth biting down on his lip. Another bright line of pain lances across his back. He gasps, writhing for more, please, more. At the next hit he whines, then releases a ragged cry, and finally sobs, trembling from his fingers to his toes as Gabriel carves line after line into his flesh. His back is aflame, crossed cuts bleeding as his body works to heal almost as fast as Gabriel can add to them. He never wants this to end.

All too soon, Gabriel puts the whip down, stepping close to press his chest against Jack’s still-bleeding back. “So good for me, you took that so well, Jackie.” Jack whines, rocks back to press himself tight against Gabriel, to feel the bright-sharp tug at his wounds, the sting as Gabriel’s smoke worms its way into the open skin, aggravating the flesh like rock salt. Poking and pulling at the cuts, tearing deeper and deeper like Gabriel can climb inside his body if he tries hard enough. Jack turns his head to press his lips to Gabriel’s neck. “Please,” he mutters into the bird-fast pulse, “more, please.”

Gabriel noses at the soft hairs at Jack’s temple and hums low in his chest. The sound resonates through Jack like a purr. “More? What more do you want?” An expectant pause, then, “Do you want me to fuck you Jackie? Is that what you’ve been waiting for?”

Jack pants against Gabriel’s neck, hot puffs of air across his sweaty skin, nodding almost frantically in agreement. Presses himself even closer to Gabriel to feel the hard line of his cock pressed up against his ass, pressing his thighs close as Gabriel reaches down to slide it between his legs. 

They’d tried penetrative sex, at first, when they were still learning each others’ bodies. A variety of ways, variety of positions. Jack’s healing factor had come into play in a way that neither of them had anticipated, tightening his muscles too rapidly for Gabriel to stretch him enough to take his cock, no matter the process they went through to try and keep them soft. Jack had been bitterly, crushingly disappointed, but Gabriel was creative and had found no shortage of ways to get them both off. As he said, sometimes the old ways were the best.

The drag of Gabriel’s cock is slightly dry between his thighs, but Jack is too far gone to really care. Gabriel clutches him close, palms at his cock as he squirms, overwhelmed by sensations that are simultaneously too much and not enough. The hot pain of his back, the sparks of pleasure from Gabriel’s motions, it mixes into something heady and rich. But not enough to tip him over. A constant, consuming tease. 

Jack finds himself muttering into Gabriel’s neck again, “Please, Gabi, my hip, please, just like old times, I want it, please, please.” Fragments of sentences, half formed, but a plea that Gabriel understands. He lets Jack beg for a time before his motions slow, fingertips gently drumming on the puckered scar over his hip. Jack lets out a whine, clenching his thigh muscles to feel Gabriel press against him, into him, just once more. He wants Gabriel inside of him, wants that completeness which always washes over him when he has Gabriel’s fingers pressing deep, deep under the skin. Wants his cock, has always wanted it, hates that he can never have it, but this is almost perfect. Just as intense, and intimate, that soul-deep completion that he only gets with Gabriel inside him. He whines again, pleading.

“You really want me to pull that bullet out, huh?” Gabriel asks absently, “You always were such a greedy thing when you were like this.” His fingers tap, tap, tap over the scar, nails morphing from dull keratin to nanite-enhanced claws and back again. Jack resists the urge to press into the light points of pain, finally lets his feet slide on the slick floor until his weight hangs from his wrists above them. Giving himself over completely, trying to entice Gabriel into a decision. To convince him to say yes.

He comes to a resolution soon enough. “You have to hold still, Jackie, can you do that for me?”

“Yes,” Jack breathes, breath coming even shorter now that his weight is entirely supported by the ropes. He trembles with the force of holding himself still, muscles tensed and tight, trying so hard to do what Gabriel asks. Trying to be good for him. He looks down at Gabriel’s fingers still tapping against his hip, blackness curling its way down to the nail and lengthening them into something vicious. The implicit danger sends a ripple of emotion down his spine, dark desire, warm and shivery, mixing with the pain until he feels almost delirious with it. His back is healing in fits and starts, trying to close around the nanites, radiating heat, and Gabriel’s cock is still hard between his thighs. Water drips in a corner of the room. Everything seems to stand still.

Then Gabriel is ripping into his flesh, claws easily piercing through the skin and fat, extending into the muscle and sinew below. He’s gentle, in a way, not slicing unnecessarily, but the pain is overwhelming all the same. Jack throws his head back, would have headbutted Gabriel if he hadn’t been ready for it, tenses up further, taut as a bowstring. Gabriel growls praise in his ear, rooting around carefully for the bullet buried somewhere inside him, so terribly horrifyingly intimate. Reaching deep inside him, claws scraping against bone and making him gasp, pressing deeper and deeper until, at last, they find the metal lodged inside. The damp sucking sensation of it being pulled out is almost more than Jack can bear, the relief and disappointment and the sensation of being tugged at from the inside. Gabriel’s free hand wraps around his cock, palms gently at him as the bullet reaches the skin, and with that Jack is coming. 

He comes down slowly, piece by piece. He recalls Gabriel cutting the ropes and taking his weight as he falls, being led to a pile of blankets in the corner of the room. He presses himself close to Gabriel, heedless of the blood still dripping from the newly opened wound at his hip. Lying with his head on Gabriel’s lap, he notices that Gabriel is still hard. “You never came,” Jack mutters.

“It isn’t important, tonight is for you,” Gabriel tells him, running his fingers through Jack’s hair. Jack makes eye contact, a vague, assessing gaze in his look, then slowly leans in to take Gabriel into his mouth. Gabriel’s breath stutters in his chest, and Jack hums his pleasure. He’s slow, hazy still, all gentle suction and languid licks. Something new. 

Gabriel continues to card his fingers through Jack’s hair, to pet down his neck and across his shoulders. He watches as Jack’s back finishes healing, without the nanites to dissuade it, leaving flat, silvery stripes that send a surge of pleased warmth down his spine. 

His hip slows its bleeding, too, muscle knitting back together in thin tendrils, skin slowly stretching out from the fringes of the wound. The fat layer, disrupted as it was, will take longer to come back than the rest, leaving Jack with a sharp divot brought into relief by the bright vascularity of the new scar. Gabriel wants to bite over it, bruise the new flesh as Jack begged and pleaded for more, but that wasn’t for tonight. Jack has already taken so much, been so good for him, he can wait.

Eventually he comes, after some indeterminate amount of time, and Jack swallows him down with a pleased noise. Gabriel coaxes him up once he becomes too sensitive, kisses him softly and sweetly until their lips begin to redden. Tucking Jack against his side, he feeds him a protein bar bite by bite, each morsel broken off in his fingers then pressed to Jack’s mouth. They trade sips of water, slow and dreamlike. Eventually, they fall asleep, curled around each other like they always have been. Two halves of some broken whole.

They miss training the next morning. Their explanation of trust exercises is met with general scepticism, and McCree’s raucous laughter.


End file.
